Virtual Microscopy: See What Your Eyes Have Been Missing
Mold as seen using virtual microscopy
The main purpose of the virtual microscope is to allow the user to scan through increasingly magnified images of a common object or a disease causing microbe or substance. You begin with an image taken at the lowest magnification necessary to visualize it with the naked eye and increase the magnification in discrete steps to show the complexity of the objects at higher magnifications. Our hope is to help students and the public understand the scale differences between the world visible by the unaided eye and the hidden world that can only be seen using complex technologies.
One of The goals of University of Montana’s Electron Microscopy Facility is to help students and the public gain a better understanding of the micro-world that exists beyond the ability of the naked eye to see. The local and national media bombard us daily with items on diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, parasites, and sometimes even our own cells. Yet how many of us understand the size and scale relationships between what we can see with our unassisted eyes and what is visible only through the use of the most powerful microscopes? Our facility has developed a way to view images of objects from the structures visible to the naked eye down to those visible only at the tiniest scale - the nanometer scale! How small is that?
When you use our virtual microscope, each image will have a size bar to indicate the decrease in size as the object is magnified. Open the size and scale icon and you will see the visual size limits of the naked eye, the conventional light microscope, and electron microscopes alongside the sizes of common objects to provide a reference. The measurement icon opens a chart showing the metric unit scale from the meter to one billionth of a meter (the nanometer).
Although this project is just in the beginning stages we have several image sets on our web site. You will be able to see what bread mold really does to bread, or how sharp a razor blade looks up close, and how creepy a parasitic human blood fluke is as well as others. In the future we hope to have enough image sets on the site to help educators explain the micro and nano-scale world to their students. Give virtual microscopy a try!